


so inclined

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters: Gold Rush!AU [66]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/M, Gen, Mea Culpa more like Mae culpa, Post-Funeral, Roman Catholicism, more of Mae's miserable backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-04 19:14:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18610777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Maedhros, on reflection, might have done things differently.





	so inclined

“Do you know,” Maglor asks, “if Father discharged the servants, or merely sent them home for the day?”

Maglor weeps and sings and passes trembling hands over his face, but when it comes to the origins of his next meal, he is remarkably practical.

Maedhros is tempted to be scornful, but that would be unfair. 

“He sent them home early,” he says at last. The knees of his trousers are crusted with mud. He wonders, without caring, if they are ruined.

He wonders, caring very much, if things would have been different if he and Maglor had stayed in the city for the summer.

They are men, now—he is twenty-two and Maglor is twenty, and yet they cling to the family homestead with childish attention (or maybe that is just Maedhros).

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Maglor grumbles, and Maedhros has forgotten what he is talking about.

“I’m going to bathe,” he says.

“You’ll have to draw the water yourself.” And maybe Maglor is not so practical after all, for he stretches out on the sofa in his street clothes, and throws his arm over his eyes.

Around them, the house is hollow, much like the space left by a missing tooth. Maedhros bites his lips for a moment, and then he climbs the stairs.

Hours ago, they were all here. Grieving, but here. He lurches a little, and wars against a rising sob. Even in grief he is selfish. He wants his smallest brothers, who still profess to need him. He wants his mother, for all that he is twenty-two.

 

“ _You do not mind staying up with them?_ ” Mother asked, the night after the news came, when Maedhros was sitting on Amrod’s bed with both Amrod and Amras tucked against him, sleeping at last.

He didn’t. Even in grief, he is selfish.

 

Maedhros stops by his room and collars a bottle of liquor. Then he sets to work doing what the servants are not here to do—heating pots of water and filling the copper tub. He runs out of patience halfway and tops it off with cold water. The liquor will keep him warm.

(But what is the purpose, of making his body clean? Both spirit and flesh are weak.)

 

They had to send street sweepers to Grandfather Finwe’s home, so that the blood and brain could be scrubbed from the stone steps.

Maedhros’s teeth are chattering, even with the liquor hot in his throat. His arms prickle, chilled. He grips the curved basin edges, as if to stand, and dreams, instead, of sinking.

Blood and brain.

His grandfather.

 

Half an hour later, he is buttoned into fresh clothes, with the water combed from his hair and a pin in his collar sharp enough for stabbing.

He does not wear Finwe’s ring.

 

“Have you eaten?” Maglor asks. Maglor looks as if he has not moved from his elegant sprawl, but there is a plate of cold turkey balanced on his chest that was certainly not there before.

“I am not hungry,” Maedhros answers.

(They stayed up late the night before, sharing a bedroom because their brothers had taken the rest of the rooms, and they laughed at memories of joy even as grief dampened their cheeks.)

“I…” Maglor looks very young, lying there, and Maedhros has to turn away his eyes.

“I’m going out,” he says. The city air will be far from refreshing, though rain still hangs in the clouds above. Maedhros would almost welcome its fall, would not mind another suit of clothes ruined.

If only that were all!

 

He is short of breath, though he has not been running. He must not have had enough to drink—he abstained since the news of death came, home with watchful eyes everywhere, and now he craves it sorely.

(He is not such a fool as to believe that eyes alone prevented him. There is less need for drink when he can trust in arms around him.)

Maedhros swipes a hand over his mouth. Sweat is gathering on his lips, his brow. He saw a world end today, even if Athair—Athair who cried out once, horribly, and then went silent—will not say so. Athair is racked with secrets, because he cannot own that he is also racked with pain.

As for Maedhros…he lost his heart once, and drowned his sorrows if not himself. That is the way of things. He lost his heart, and it was an ugly, raw-scraped thing to begin with. Maedhros is suited for nothing that his life demands.

The cobbles gleam under the street lamps. It is hard to smell the sea, here. Horses and coal and people, most of all, see to that.

 

(He hadn’t seen Fingon all summer.)

 

Air like this is as foul as the air at Formenos is sweet. All the same, he gathers a lungful of it, breathing a little better, and he stares at shuttered windows he has passed before.

(Passed. He passed by, for he has never needed this.)

 

Night is yet far from morning when he stumbles out again. His clothes are indeed ruined, and his head aches, not only from drinking.

The woman would not take his money. This is somehow worse.

(His head aches from weeping, because that is what he came for. Arms to hold him, lips to caress him, and no one to remember or recount his miserable tears.)

 

Maglor is asleep when he slips inside, the house-key shaking in his fingers.

Is that mercy?

 

When day dawns, splitting his skull with light—

—Maedhros wishes, not for the first time, that the bullet had taken  _him_.

 

(Fingon and he agreed to put their fathers’ quarrel behind them. It was not that simple. Fingon is proud, and Maedhros is desperate, only Fingon didn’t used to know that, and now he does.

They had almost a quarrel or two of their own, and then almost a coolness, and then Maedhros went back to Formenos, knowing he had no right to be hurt.)

 

His grandfather’s funeral returned to him the hope of that friendship. He threw it away.

 

There is always a priest to be found in the confessional at St. Patrick’s, muttering Latin prayers over his rosary beads behind the heavy velvet curtains. Maedhros genuflects and bows his head, shadowed in the recesses beneath pillars and vaults.

If only God was not all-seeing—but the tabernacle gleams golden, like a single eye, and Maedhros feels himself pierced.

Old women are already waiting in line, grandmothers with grandchildren who are just out of their long dresses and into their first small sins.

Maedhros drags his thumbnail against his wrist, to find a pulse or slice a vein.

 _Forgive me, father_.

He’s said those words so many times, and there are different wrongs believed by different fathers. Although, what he has done in despair, these hours past, must surely shame them both.

_Fingon forgave you. Did you scarcely notice? Did that not matter more?_

 

Blood and brain. He has betrayed both.

(Oh, when they climbed the steps a day ago, the stains were still there beneath the mud and rain. He knows because he looked for them.)

 

“Maedhros?”

This is no single, golden eye.

This is his cousin.

 

“Fingon.” He feels a little faint. It feels too much like that time he fled Fingolfin’s steely calm, only to find the dark, boyish head bent over a book of mad scribblings, in his own room. “What brings you here?”

“Penance,” Fingon answers, as if Fingon sins. “I…” And there is his hand, warm on Maedhros’s arm, through the sleeve of his coat. “Will you wait for me?”

“Wait?”

“After I go in. I should like to speak to you.”

Maedhros might have met him yesterday evening, and felt less shame than he does now. Why can he never satisfy himself with conversation? Why must he always—

Now, he wonders if the smell of sin clings to him, despite fresh linen and more cold water. He wonders if Fingon knows what such sins even look like, the blackness they bring into the softer shadows of a holy church.

“I’ll wait for you,” he whispers.

“Very good,” Fingon says, with his square, bright smile, and then it is Maedhros’s turn to go in and kneel, nails biting into the backs of his hands as he laces his fingers together.

The priest blesses himself.

Maedhros doesn’t dare to.

 

“And was this the first time you have committed such a sin?”

“No.” He hopes Fingon is occupied in line with whatever grandmother is nearest, and cannot hear even a single word. “I—it has been a more than a year, though.”

“Fornication is like a hook in the soul,” the priest says grimly. Maedhros winces, as he always does, to hear it said aloud. “If you do not beware, it will drag you lower and lower, until it wastes away body and spirit together.”

“I know.” Maedhros squeezes his eyes shut, even though he cannot see the priest through the grate, and can hardly see the grate in the darkness, anyway.

The priest clears his throat. “Are you sorry for this mortal sin?”

“Very sorry, Father.” If Fingolfin finds out, it won’t be enough. Fingolfin must never find out.

(God sees everything, but— _does this not matter more?_ )

 

He steps outside, and there is so much light, in contrast to the confessional.

Or maybe that is just Fingon, in contrast to himself.

Fingon grins at him, tearing himself away from conversation with a stooped old crone whose knees seem to be troubling her, and the curtains rustle behind him.

Maedhros wants to run, but he promised.

He kneels to mumble through a string of unfinished prayers, his heart beating nearly out of his chest, until Fingon taps him on the shoulder at last.

“Finished?”

 _It is finished_ , are words from a cross Maedhros can’t quite look at, even though his soul has been wiped clean.

(Both spirit and flesh are weak.)

“Yes,” he says, and they leave the church behind them.

 

Fingon walks with his hands in his trouser pockets, his coat rumpled upto allow the pose, and he has a Fingolfian furrow between his brows.

“Is something wrong?” Maedhros asks mildly.

“I should hate to say that a sacrament isn’t enough,” Fingon blurts out, “But—oh, hang it all, Maedhros. I have to confess to you, too.”

Maedhros is quite taken aback, and quite bent on not showing it. “Indeed? I’m not a priest.”  _The farthest thing from.  
_

“No, but you’re my cousin, and my best friend, and I—I’ve been spiteful.”

“ _Fingon_.”

“I have!” Fingon turns his head from side to side, as if casting about for somewhere to sit down, and Maedhros guides him by the elbow to a garden gate he knows to be not far away. 

When they are surrounded by a little green—and by air a little fresher—Maedhros asks,

“Spiteful?”

“I broke my own word, that we should never be parted,” Fingon says, “No matter what our families did. I swore to myself that I meant it, and then—and then—” Fingon stutters a little when he is distressed.

Maedhros is not exactly distressed. He doesn’t know what he is; only that there are many hooks buried in his soul, and they all tug a little differently.

“I cannot speak ill of my father as you wish I would,” Maedhros suggests, very quietly. “Is that it?”

“No,” Fingon says. “That’s just the trouble. I shouldn’t want that of you, Maitimo. I see that, now. I’ve been prideful, and insistent, and I almost lost you for it.”

 

(If he hadn’t run back to Formenos, how much could he have saved?)

 

“You didn’t lose me,” he says. “I’ve just been a wretched fool. It’s over, now.”

Fingon opens his mouth, to offer a correction of this self-assessment, no doubt, but then he shuts it again. Fingon is painstakingly fair, and so he likely remembers how he forestalled such an attempt by Maedhros a moment ago.

“That’s settled, then,” Fingon says, eyes brighter than the day (for all the rain is gone). “I’ve only to pay three rosaries for it—I’ll have to start them tonight or I’ll never remember. You?”

A month’s hard fast of bread and water, but Maedhros isn’t going to tell him that. “Just about the same.”

They do not stay in the garden long. They walk, and after a while Fingon’s smile fades, and he reaches for his pocket handkerchief. “I miss him,” he says. “Oh, saints—I really miss him.”

“As you can likely tell from the way I threw myself on the ground beside his grave,” Maedhros reminds him dryly, “I miss him, too.”

“We should drink to his health,” Fingon proposes. “A toast, to our dear grandfather.”

Maedhros bites his tongue. “Another time,” he says, with a smile whose charm he knows to be undimmed by the tears in his eyes. “For now, let us keep walking.”

 

He offers the barmaid money, at first. Money in exchange for information.

She doesn't take it.

She opens his shirt, instead, her fingers hooking and tugging it down over his shoulders, and this is a room as hollow as the space left by a broken promise, and Maedhros—

— _sinks._


End file.
